The Unmade World

by Steve Yarbrough

  When she and Roman reach her villa, she tells him to go on inside, that she needs to continue down the street and check on a few things in the office. He offers to accompany her, but she says that’s not necessary, and he doesn’t protest. She’s got him trained. Their situation, vis-à-vis each other, is satisfactory. This has been a surprising development. A decade ago, she hired him to wash dishes.

  At the pension, she finds a few guests sitting near the fireplace, having drinks and swapping lies about their prowess on the slopes. She has firm rules: no alcohol downstairs after ten o’clock, which has come and gone. As she passes, she glances at her watch. They’re clearing out before she unlocks the office.

  It’s at the foot of the stairs. She goes inside and sits down at her desk but leaves the lamps off. Otherwise, a strip of light would be visible. She knows it would because she saw it one evening back in the late ’90s, and when she entered to turn them out, she found a newly hired waitress at her computer stealing the guests’ personal info. You can’t be too careful whom you trust.

  She trusts Bogdan, and she’s come to trust Elena. More importantly, she would entrust Bogdan to Elena, though she didn’t realize that until this evening, when she saw them together on Krupowki. There’s a certain steadiness about the Ukrainian woman; you can see it in the way she handles plates and saucers, cups and glasses. She understands how easy it is to break things.

  They don’t come back and they don’t come back, and it gets later and later. Finally, Teresa hears the front door opening, followed by the sound of soft voices. They linger in the foyer for a moment, then start upstairs. When their footsteps stop, she cracks her door and listens, her forehead pressed against the wood.

  Here is what he will always remember:

  She pauses on his landing rather than continuing up the stairs toward her room, where he had hoped they would go together. There’s a single light here, a wall-mounted lamp that matches those on all the other landings. Three or four years ago, a drunken Latvian grabbed it as he was about to fall, as if something so flimsy could save him, and the light came free, pulling a chunk of wall with it. Bogdan replastered and toggle-bolted it up there. It won’t come down again. Because he can think of nothing else to say as they stand there facing each other, and because something needs to be said, he points at the light and tells her that he put it there himself. He tells her about the Latvian, how apologetic he was, how the next morning, as he sat in the dining room, contemplating a breakfast he was too ill to eat, he saw Teresa bearing down on him.

  “He was a tough-looking guy,” he hears himself tell Elena. “If I’d seen him coming toward me in a dark alley, I would have taken off running. Which is exactly what he did when he saw my sister. He threw his napkin on the table and jumped up so fast his chair went over backward.” The last part is made up, invented there on the landing to help both of them through an awkward moment that he now knows will not end the way he’d dared imagine it might. How could you tell the things they’ve told each other tonight and do anything more than seek the silence of your own room? Nobody in his right mind would think otherwise.

  The problem is, there’s a serious flaw in the story he’s just made up, which should conclude with the big Latvian racing out the dining hall’s rear entrance to escape Teresa’s wrath. The flaw is that the dining hall has no rear entrance. It’s a single long room, with a doorway that leads into the living room, which is where Teresa would have come from. The only other door leads to the kitchen, but the kitchen has no rear entrance either, which Elena knows all too well, since she spends a good part of her days in there and part of her evenings too.

  While he’s trying to imagine some graceful way out of this narrative conundrum, Elena wraps her arms around him, the top of her head grazing his chin. “Make me love,” she says.

  In the remains of the Tatra winter comes a flowering. Neither announced nor denied, the shift in his standing with Elena is understood by his sister and Roman, by the desk clerks and cleaning women and the other waitresses, who regard the interloper with rigid smiles. The one who’d told her of Bogdan’s term in jail had recognized the potential entanglement from the outset. That was why she had passed on news of his sketchy past. Though he would not suspect it, she’d fancied him herself. He reminds her of her grandfather, perhaps the only other man she’s ever known who never behaves like a lout. Overall, she holds a higher opinion of draft horses.

  After breakfast, when Bogdan drives departing guests to the station, Elena sometimes rides along. The pension serves only breakfast and supper, and once the kitchen is squared away, she has several hours to herself. They often park the van at the foot of Krupowki and visit the farm stalls. Most days, at least two or three breeders are offering St. Bernard puppies.

  He broached the possibility of buying a dog the afternoon his sister picked him up from the correctional facility. She said absolutely not. The codes governing B&Bs require special permits, she told him, and she didn’t need the hassle. Still, he loves to stop by the stalls and play with the puppies. At first, the breeders considered him a nuisance, because it quickly became apparent he’d never buy. But over time, their attitude toward the aging man with the ugly mole has softened. As one of them observed to a competitor, “Dogs like him, and that’s usually a good sign. Most of my dogs are smarter than I am, and all of yours are smarter than you.”

  One March morning, when it’s unseasonably warm and snowmelt has turned everything soggy, Elena stands watching him as he kneels on a tarp, letting one of the furry creatures slobber on his palm. It seems every boy wants a dog—Serhiy did, but they always told him no—and in certain ways every man is still a boy. She has thought a lot about this lately and is convinced that the obverse is not true. There is none of the girl left in her. There is none left in most women she knows.

  Some of Bogdan’s boyhood passed when he crushed that dog’s skull. Much more of it passed when he panicked and ran back to the car and left that man and his family to die. He didn’t know he was carrying that boyhood around with him; this much was clear to her when he told her in the bar about all that had happened. His innocence was touching, it was maddening, it was somehow right and wrong at once that a man could reach the age he must have been when he committed these bad acts and still carry a boy around inside.

  He rolls the puppy onto its back and pats its pink belly. “You’ll be a big one,” he says. He clasps one of its forepaws like he’s sealing a business deal. “Look at the size of these paws,” he says to no one in particular. “He’d make a great rescue dog.”

  In the bar, she asked if he prayed to God about what had happened, and he said no, he didn’t believe in God. He said it apologetically, as if he feared it would offend. He must have heard her praying at night and would naturally have assumed she was pious, when in truth she was anything but. She prayed because she was scared, the same reason she drank and walked the floor until she fell in upon herself. Now that she knew her daughter was alive, she had quit. When all the addition and subtraction were done, God was still in the red with her.

  She’d asked Bogdan what he would say if he ever met the wronged American face to face. He couldn’t answer. He could only bow his head. That was when she knew that no matter what he claimed, he believed in the god he didn’t pray to. In one way or another, she thought, most people do. Her grandfather was a Communist. He prayed three times a day.

  Finally, Bogdan said, “I’ll never see him again. I don’t even know if he’s still alive. His reports no longer appear in the paper. They haven’t for years.”

  “You still ought to know what you would say,” she said. “For your own understanding. You couldn’t just stare at him. You couldn’t run away again.”

  “What could I say? ‘Sorry’ is too small a word.”

  “It may be small, but it’s a good place to start.”

  “Elena?” For the first time, he addressed her by name. “If the man who shot the missile at your son told you he was sorry, what would y
ou say?”

  “I would say to him that he was some other woman’s son. I would say all day long if I have to, and maybe I would have to.”

  “What good would saying it do?”

  “What good not saying it would do when somebody lays his ‘sorry’ down before you?” She could tell from his facial expression that her Polish had just failed her. Yet she continued. “What good it would do,” she said, “to keep an angry air?”

  Bogdan quits playing with the dog he can’t buy because his sister won’t let him. “Well,” he says, “we’d better be getting home.” When they leave, the puppy tries to follow, but the breeder grabs him by the scruff of the neck.

  Driving back to the pension, he asks if she saw the news this morning from Donetsk: Nadezhda Savchenko, the Ukrainian pilot accused in the deaths of two Russian journalists, has been sentenced to twenty-two years. Apparently, the trial was a mockery, the judge taking two days to read the decision, during which time Savchenko periodically broke into Ukrainian folk song and shot her finger at the court.

  “No,” she says, turning away from him, looking out the window at a group carrying their ski gear toward the lift. “But then I wasn’t searching for news either. I already got the only news that matters.”

  Two days ago, she finally spoke to her daughter. Last year, during the shelling of Debaltseve, she suffered severe shrapnel wounds. Her surgery, the doctors said, lasted fourteen hours. In frigid weather, with poor sanitary conditions and untreated water, she developed viral hepatitis. Her weight dropped to thirty-eight kilos. She’s regained some of her strength, but now she has chronic hypertension and elevated blood sugar. Elena says her health will probably never be good again, though she used to be a robust girl.

  He rarely mentions the war to her, and when he does, it’s usually at night, when they’re together in his bed—he has not been inside her room since the time he went to check on her radiator. She comes to him each evening around ten thirty, fully clothed, the nightgown he bought her rolled up and tucked away beneath her sweater.

  In the dark, she’s different, the stiffly starched daytime persona replaced by something soft. Rather than the explosive, even angry lover he might have expected, she’s slow and probing, each move tentative, as if subject to revision. Her voice changes too, its timbre, its texture. Especially when she speaks her own language. Some of it he understands. Some of it he doesn’t.

  “Will you ever go back?” he asked the other night, after she talked to her daughter. He lay on his back, her head resting on his chest.

  “No,” she said, “I won’t never.”

  “Not even if the war ends?”

  “No. It’s not home anymore.”

  “You must’ve had friends.”

  “Some died. Some that didn’t might as well have. They won’t be alive the same way they were.”

  A novel and not altogether unpersuasive notion: that there were different ways of being alive, as opposed to different ways of living. He resisted the urge to ask that she expound. It might not sound as viable the second time around.

  The other thing he resists is thinking too much about the future. He does not take it as a given that she will keep appearing outside his door, even though it’s been happening for several weeks. He regards her company as a gift, one that he does not deserve but will gladly accept as long as it’s offered.

  On nights when they don’t feel like making love, they drink a shot or two of vodka, lie there, and talk. When she asks about Krysia, he answers all her questions. No, he doesn’t hate her girlfriend. Yes, they’re doing well: he knows that from Marek. They own their own salon now, and from what he’s heard, you have to make an appointment a couple of weeks in advance. She asked him about Marek. He suffered a heart attack last year, he told her, and he and Inga have moved to a smaller flat, in a not-so-great building, but whenever he sees them, they seem cheerful. They dote on their grandkids.

  Once, she asked him if he’d ever slept with his friend’s wife. He said no but that the night he got out of jail to await trial, after having a lot to drink, they’d fooled around while Marek snored in the next room.

  “Did you feel evil about it?”

  “I felt evil while I was doing it. I think maybe that was part of the pleasure.”

  “And what about afterward?”

  “No, I didn’t. I mean, compared to other things I’ve done, it seemed kind of minor. But I would’ve hated it if Marek found out.”

  “What happens when you see this woman now?”

  “Sometimes she winks at me. And I wink back.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “It’s the correct way to behave.”

  “Why’d you ask me about her?”

  “I was curious. The way you talked about her told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “That there was something about her you valued a lot. How solid she was, like a German monument.”

  He ran his hand over her shoulders. He’d found supple languor rather than the angularity he’d expected. “Did you ever do anything like that?”

  “I did twice. A long time back.”

  “By twice, you mean two different affairs?”

  “No, I mean twice one night. Same man both times. It was worse than what you did. We was not just clowning around. For several hours, we was very serious.”

  “And then?”

  “The sun shined on us. Don’t it always?”

  He asked if overall her marriage had been a good one.

  “Overall? It was not so bad. I knew him since I was four years old. I knew everything about him.”

  “What was one thing you knew that nobody else did?”

  “He brush his teeth with hot water.”

  “I’ve never heard of anything like that. Why’d he do it?”

  “You know, I never wondered about it till . . . well, till after what happened, which is when you start over the stuff that don’t matter to anyone else. His teeth looked nice, but I think he must have had some of those holes in them.”

  “Cavities?”

  “Cavities. And so maybe cold water hurt them. Such a big man, he wasn’t scared of much, but he was fearful of the dentist. Not for nothing would he go.”

  Morning came. Don’t it always?

  She never sets the alarm but wakes without fail at five thirty, puts on her jeans and green sweater, and leaves him to sleep alone for another hour. At breakfast, when she serves him, she behaves like he’s nobody special. Maybe he is. Maybe he’s not.

  He parks the van, and they climb out and start across the slippery parking lot toward the pension. He knows that if he doesn’t rush to keep up, she will get ahead of him. Wherever they might be, she walks with greater purpose than he does. She always seems to know exactly where she’s going. Whereas he knows only where his next step will fall.

  The main street in the Hudson Valley town where Richard has lived since 2012 is lined on both sides by restaurants, cafés, and antique stores—more than twenty of the latter, by his own count, a new one having opened just last week. Lots of people from the city come here on weekends, some of them because they own properties like the one he rents from a young literary agent, some because they can’t stand the pace another moment and have to get away for a couple of days or go crazy. There’s no hotel in town, but it’s the Airbnb capital of New York state. On Fridays and Saturdays, if you haven’t made a dinner reservation, you can’t get a table anywhere.

  There are plenty of choices here for breakfast, which he nearly always eats out. He does this because mornings are still sometimes tough, and though he likes to start his days slowly and does not necessarily want to run into friends from the strange little college where he works, he does want to hear voices, see people moving around. If he eats breakfast at home, it’s far too easy to remain there all morning, and if he remains there all morning, he might remain there all day. For this reason, he always requests an eleven o’clock class, but he almost never gets one. The students who are drawn
to this particular school are artsy types who love the nightlife and may not go to bed until dawn. Classes before noon don’t draw, even if you’re as popular as he is.

  Today he chooses a café that offers twenty-five or thirty different types of crepes and has a vintage sign motif. Only one table is free, and it’s right in front, with a perfect view of the street. His predecessor left behind a copy of the Times. After the waiter takes his order, he picks up the paper.

  Sipping coffee, he scans the articles about the current presidential campaign, which has become one of the most ludicrous in history, featuring references to penis size and menstruation, along with nude photos of one candidate’s spouse. With greater interest, he reads a piece about the new Polish government, whose defense minister has suggested forming paramilitary squads to keep the country safe. These organizations, the minister says, could draw their membership from gun clubs and football “associations”—presumably allowing soccer hooligans to subject the rest of society to the beatings they typically inflict on one another. It sounds like the Brown Shirts. More than twenty-five years of progress have been wiped out in a matter of months, and it’s hard not to wonder how Julia would react if she still lived there, whether she would have it in her to fight those battles all over again.

  When he turns to the sports section, his attention is grabbed by a small item under “NFL Notes”:

  Nick Major, the former head coach at Central California, has been hired as a consultant by the Baltimore Ravens. Major will work with the offensive coordinator Mike Brown and advise the scouting department. Last year, Major was quarterback coach at the University of Louisville. Previous stops in his coaching career include Texas Tech, where he was offensive coordinator, Northern Iowa, Montana State, New Mexico and West Virginia. His only prior NFL experience came in 2013, when he served as tight ends’ coach in Cincinnati. In 2009, a season in which he was involved in a sex scandal, Major’s Central California team earned the right to play for the national championship, losing to LSU. He was fired the following year after a 4-8 finish.